Re: [Mifos-users] [Mifos-developer] Whats after Maya G?

[Keith W. <kei...@gm...>]

Binny,

> Are we concentrating too much on technical improvements while not paying
> adequate attention to new/improved features?

Yes, this is the whole point of this email chain. I was asking for
input/feedback from the users about what to put into mifos after Maya
G. So far only george has offered some insight into what might be
useful going forward. From a technical point of view we know what we
need to do but theres no point in taking on that investment unless
customers out there want further features/improvements etc

regards,
Keith.

On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 5:50 AM, Binny Gopinath <bin...@gm...> wrote:
>
> Are we concentrating too much on technical improvements while not paying
> adequate attention to new/improved features?
>
> Technical improvements without any visible improvement to end-users - may
> cause users to consider moving away from Mifos. I would like releases to be
> a mix of new/improved functional features + a bunch of technical
> improvements. I have had the chance to get a glimpse into some of our
> competition and very soon our feature set is going to be insufficient, which
> is heartbreaking ..
>
> On technical improvements:
> - would be good to include testing/handling of larger volumes - I have had a
> couple of enquiries from large MFI's - one of them has 4+ million members
> - on i18n, would be good to allow overriding of specific internationalized
> labels look up from config folders - so that they do not get overwritten by
> any upgrades. And also handle date formats consistently, especially in
> reports.
>
> Thanks
> Binny
>
>
> On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 10:33 AM, Van Mittal-Henkle
> <va...@gr...> wrote:
>>
>> George,
>>
>> I'm catching up on some of these threads after being out for a few days
>>
>> > - there's a mobile revolution underway in sub-Saharan Africa; building
>> > both the APIs/hooks for connecting into a variety of mobile systems
>> > (from mobile money to mobile interfaces for clients and MFI staff to
>> > exchange of info with other systems that are running mobile apps) and
>> > also potentially getting a few sample/reference mobile apps running on
>> > Mifos (need to vet specific pain points so we don't build something
>> > just for the sake of building it)
>>
>> If Mifos provided Restful or WSDL based APIs it would open up lots of
>> possibilities for building on Mifos for things like this.  Having stable
>> APIs for people to build on is one of the things we have been working
>> towards for some time.  A lot of KeithW's efforts in particular have
>> been around getting internals to a state where we could start layering
>> an API on them.  As mentioned, getting specific customers with specific
>> use cases to drive this is key.
>>
>> > also for you and the other engineers who have worked on MIfos: in a
>> > community model if there's less oversight, is there under-the-covers
>> > work that should be prioritized which will help keep Mifos stable and
>> > scalable as it goes forward in the community?
>>
>> Here's where some big questions come up.
>>
>> One hypothesis is that there are two classes of Mifos users-- Class 1:
>> larger MFIs who have a need for various extensions and customizations of
>> Mifos and who can take on some expense to do that and even host their
>> own infrastructure and Class 2: smaller MFIs who could likely manage
>> with fewer features and less extensibility and who would benefit most
>> from low cost hosted access to Mifos.
>>
>> How to most effectively meet the needs of both users is tricky.
>>
>> We've been challenged by the current code base being difficult and
>> expensive to extend and maintain.  We have made progress in improving
>> the code and certain areas of it are much easier to deal with now.
>> However, there is still a large amount of code left that needs
>> improvement.
>>
>> The most cost effective way to deliver a solution that can be
>> effectively hosted at very low cost (supporting multi-tenancy for
>> example) at this point looks like a rewrite that would pull in reusable
>> parts of Mifos but redo the basics from the ground up to get things like
>> multi-tenancy, transaction management, auditing, clean i18n, layered
>> architecture, separation of concerns and manageable tests in place.  To
>> keep the cost of doing a rewrite low, it would help for the target
>> release to have fewer features and options than Mifos currently does.
>>
>> On the other hand,  supporting larger existing and new MFIs and those
>> requiring the larger feature set currently supported by Mifos would
>> benefit from the current code base being extended and refined.  The
>> difficulty here is that the cost to continue maintaining the current
>> code is high as is the cost to refactor and improve it.
>>
>> Keith and I are in agreement on the things that he already laid out
>> here:
>> http://mifosforge.jira.com/wiki/display/MIFOS/Technical+Roadmap+%28Post+
>> Maya+G+and+onwards%29
>>
>> This is a good list of how the current code base could be moved forward.
>>
>>
>> Replacing the current Struts/JSP based UI code with Spring/Freemarker is
>> the biggest single enabler for lowering the cost of maintaining and
>> extending Mifos.  It leads to:
>> * API creation across the application (by achieving complete separation
>> of business logic from presentation code)
>> * simplified transaction management
>> * simplified i18n
>> * improvement of layered architecture
>> * reduction and simplification of test code
>>
>> --Van
>>
>>
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